Developing Questions For Stronger Comprehension

The Situation

Your students need to start developing questions about the characters, setting, text structure etc of the narrative.

The Solution

Questioning – is the process of developing questions in response to the readers’ understanding of the text.

Encouraging students to ask questions is a great way to develop higher-order thinking. Students should develop questions about characters to show a deeper understanding of the text.

It is helpful to provide students with time to consider, for example, the behaviour of characters and how things might be different under alternate circumstances.

Furthermore, you could get students to develop questions about why the author has made particular stylistic decisions. For example, why has the author chosen present the story as a diary? Or, how would the story be different if the author had chosen a different point of view?

Asking well-conceived questions will get you thoughtful answers.

Your students ability to develop thee questions comes down to the question stems you provide them along with the questions you ask.

Broad question to ask your students: 

• What were you wondering about when you read that piece?
• Can you show me a part where you were confused?  What questions came to mind at that point?
• What questions do you have right now about the character, situation, author, theme?

Question stems for students to use:

These questions could be used when getting students to think about the behaviour of characters, questions changes in the plot and .

• Why is…?
• Why did…?
• How might…?
• How did…?
• What would happen if…?
• Why has the author chosen to…?